I've read books in school that were written by ideological rote - they were brainwashers. Therefore, any art, any literature, that has a clearly defined political goal is repellent to me.

It's difficult for me to understand how it was possible to live under the Bush regime for eight years and then just roll over and do other things.

What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness - in a sense, we have to do it for the first time, every time.

I've read books in school that were written by ideological rote - they were brainwashers. Therefore, any art, any literature, that has a clearly defined political goal is repellent to me.

We apply the language that is comforting and comfortable and familiar in order to grasp that which confuses and scares us. That is the first step toward cliché and stereotype, as they're comforting devices. They reduce the confusing world to the already familiar. We're always smoothing out the bumps of actual living to turn it into narratable life.

When I was young, I was all about personal sovereignty and that junk, because there was no privacy and the available ideologies were collective, both socialism/communism and nationalism.

There is a point in fighting. There is a point in struggle. Not wholesale revolution, maybe, that might not be possible, an absolutely just society, but there are plenty of spaces and places where it's worth putting up a fight.